Information society

Proponents of this theory posit that these technologies are impacting most important forms of social organization, including education, economy,[2] health, government,[3] warfare, and levels of democracy.

[4] The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens, defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”.

This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase of society.

[5] Some of the markers of this steady change may be technological, economic, occupational, spatial, cultural, or a combination of all of these.

There is currently no universally accepted concept of what exactly can be defined as an information society and what shall not be included in the term.

][dubious – discuss] that information societies are those that have intensified their use of IT for economic, social, cultural and political transformation.

In particular, the Tunis Agenda addresses the issues of financing of ICTs for development and Internet governance that could not be resolved in the first phase.

Films are becoming more and more judged, in terms of distribution, by their first weekend's performance, in many cases cutting out opportunity for word-of-mouth development.

[17] This is the informational equivalent of 60 CD-ROM per person in 2007[18] and represents a sustained annual growth rate of some 25%.

[17] James R. Beniger describes the necessity of information in modern society in the following way: “The need for sharply increased control that resulted from the industrialization of material processes through application of inanimate sources of energy probably accounts for the rapid development of automatic feedback technology in the early industrial period (1740-1830)” (p. 174) “Even with enhanced feedback control, industry could not have developed without the enhanced means to process matter and energy, not only as inputs of the raw materials of production but also as outputs distributed to final consumption.”(p. 175)[5] One of the first people to develop the concept of the information society was the economist Fritz Machlup.

The issue of technologies and their role in contemporary society have been discussed in the scientific literature using a range of labels and concepts.

In the programmed society also the area of cultural reproduction including aspects such as information, consumption, health, research, education would be industrialized.

This makes Touraine's concept substantially different from that of Daniel Bell who focused on the capacity to process and generate information for efficient society functioning.

Radovan Richta (1977) argues that society has been transformed into a scientific civilization based on services, education, and creative activities.

Also Alvin Toffler argues that knowledge is the central resource in the economy of the information society: "In a Third Wave economy, the central resource – a single word broadly encompassing data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values – is actionable knowledge" (Dyson/Gilder/Keyworth/Toffler 1994).

"As an historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks.

Increasingly, these networks link all units or parts of this formation (individuals, groups and organizations)" (Van Dijk 2006: 20).

Darin Barney uses the term for characterizing societies that exhibit two fundamental characteristics: "The first is the presence in those societies of sophisticated – almost exclusively digital – technologies of networked communication and information management/distribution, technologies which form the basic infrastructure mediating an increasing array of social, political and economic practices.

that has mainly been voiced by critical scholars is that they create the impression that we have entered a completely new type of society.

Such assumptions would have ideological character because they would fit with the view that we can do nothing about change and have to adapt to existing political realities (kasiwulaya 2002b: 267).

For describing contemporary society based on a new dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, other critical scholars have suggested several terms like: Other scholars prefer to speak of information capitalism (Morris-Suzuki 1997) or informational capitalism (Manuel Castells 2000, Christian Fuchs 2005, Schmiede 2006a, b).

The "most decisive historical factor accelerating, channelling and shaping the information technology paradigm, and inducing its associated social forms, was/is the process of capitalist restructuring undertaken since the 1980s, so that the new techno-economic system can be adequately characterized as informational capitalism" (Castells 2000: 18).

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that contemporary society is an Empire that is characterized by a singular global logic of capitalist domination that is based on immaterial labour.

With the concept of immaterial labour Negri and Hardt introduce ideas of information society discourse into their Marxist account of contemporary capitalism.

There would be two forms: intellectual labour that produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, etc.

This can be seen through the telegraph, it was the first successful technology that could send and receive information faster than a human being could move an object.

A number of terms in current use emphasize related but different aspects of the emerging global economic order.

The Information Age is somewhat limiting, in that it refers to a 30-year period between the widespread use of computers and the knowledge economy, rather than an emerging economic order.

Responses to this concern range from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States (and similar legislation elsewhere) which make copy protection (see Digital rights management) circumvention illegal, to the free software, open source and copyleft movements, which seek to encourage and disseminate the "freedom" of various information products (traditionally both as in "gratis" or free of cost, and liberty, as in freedom to use, explore and share).

Because we lack political control of intellectual property, we are lacking in a concrete map of issues, an analysis of costs and benefits, and functioning political groups that are unified by common interests representing different opinions of this diverse situation that are prominent in the information society.